Lines in the Sand: Deadly Times in the West Bank and Gaza

By Andrew Cockburn

Photographs by Richard T. Nowitz

Revered by three faiths, the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron functions as both synagogue and mosque, sometimes in the course of a single day. In times of intense Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, authorities close off this West Bank shrine, believed to hold the remains of three pairs of biblical patriarchs and matriarchs: Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah.

Despite their hold on the world's attention, the Gaza Strip
and West Bank territories, occupied by Israel since the Six Day War in June
1967, cover relatively tiny areas. Gaza, home to 1.1 million Palestinians and
7,000 Israeli settlers (who occupy 25 percent of the land), is only 26 miles
(42 kilometers) long. A north-south drive through the center of the West Bank
on Road 60, which connects the historic cities of Jenin, Nablus, Bethlehem, and
Hebron, takes four hours. Traversing one of the modern east-west highways that cross
between the Jordan River and the so-called Green Line, which marks the West
Bank's border with Israel, should take 30 minutes.

But for most of the people who live here, time and distance
are measured differently. The 2.2 million Palestinian inhabitants of the West
Bank and East Jerusalem are effectively barred from most of Road 60 along with
many other roads carefully engineered for the use of the 376,000 Israelis who
have settled here over the past 35 years. Palestinians contemplating the
25-mile (40-kilometer) journey from Ramallah to Jericho, for example, must be
prepared to spend an entire day, sometimes days, negotiating the various Israeli
roadblocks and checkpoints along the way.

The many peoples who have lived on this land in past ages
have not always been so much at odds. A cache of letters uncovered in a cave in
the Judaean desert on the southern fringe of the West Bank 40 years ago
chronicles the daily life of Babatha, a second-century Jewish woman. Babatha
describes Jews and Arabs coexisting without friction. Just a hundred years ago
Jews, Christians, and Muslims living in Jerusalem routinely attended each
other's religious festivities. That kind of harmony eroded and disappeared in
the 20th century with the rise of nationalism—Jewish and Arab—in
the region.

Escalating hostilities led to intervention by the United
Nations, which, in 1947, produced a plan for the partition of the area, named
Palestine, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The plan awarded
slightly more than half the land to a Jewish state with the remainder allotted
to the Palestinians. Although the Jews accepted the plan, Palestinians and the
Arab states rejected it.

The following year, on May 14, Israel declared independence,
offering itself as a haven from anti-Semitism for the world's Jews. An ongoing
war between Jews and Palestinians was thereupon joined by neighboring Arab
states. When the war ended in January 1949, Israel controlled 78 percent of
Palestine, and 750,000 Palestinians became refugees.

The territory known as the West Bank—the hill country
to the west of the Jordan River—had been designated under the stillborn
UN scheme as the heart of the Palestinian state. During the war Jordan occupied
this area while Israel focused on protecting early settlements and capturing
Jerusalem. When the war was over, the West Bank and East Jerusalem were in the
hands of the Jordanian forces; Egypt controlled the Gaza Strip; Israel
controlled West Jerusalem.

Nineteen years later, in the 1967 Six Day War, Israeli
forces speedily overran Gaza and swept across the West Bank, establishing a new
frontier for Israel on the Jordan River. While the Israelis annexed East
Jerusalem, they were less certain about what to do with the rest of the newly
occupied West Bank and its million or so inhabitants. Although some Israeli
leaders favored granting limited self-government to the more densely populated
Palestinian areas, others were determined to settle Israelis amongst the
Palestinians. Their aim was to make it impossible for any future Israeli
government to pull out from what they proclaimed to be Israel's land by divine
right.

Initially such Israeli settlements—then as now illegal
under international law—were few and sparsely populated. By 1977 there were
only 4,500 Israeli settlers in the West Bank (with another 50,000 in East
Jerusalem). But following election of the conservative Likud Party government
that year, the settlement drive went into high gear. Among other initiatives to
clear land for this purpose, the new Israeli government declared that
established landowners unable to produce legal title (which most Palestinians
in the West Bank did not possess) could have their holdings seized as state
land.

To encourage settlers to move from Israel or abroad to the
settlements, successive Israeli governments offered generous subsidies, such as
tax breaks and cut-rate mortgages. Even for those not drawn by visions of
occupying the biblical land of Israel, these were attractive inducements.
Living in cheap and commodious housing, inhabitants of the larger settlement
blocs close to the Green Line could enjoy a comfortable suburban lifestyle
within an easy commute to jobs inside Israel itself. According to the Israeli
human rights organization B'Tselem, 42 percent of the land in the West Bank is
now controlled by the settlements.

By 1993 more than 115,000 Palestinians were commuting to
jobs in Israel and earning higher wages than they would have in their
traditional occupations as farmers, traders, or artisans. However, around
the same time, the Israeli government, responding to Palestinian attacks
on Israelis, began placing severe restrictions on these workers' mobility, to
the detriment of the Palestinian economy.